When we look at the cultural public sphere through the lens of digitalization, a paradoxical picture emerges: the cultural public sphere is simultaneously exploding and imploding; the most essential objectives of the Enlightenment have been attained and yet are in danger; platforms and algorithms are vehicles both for self-determination and for heteronomy. Long-standing values from the Enlightenment values and new realities, the citizen and the consumer, rational systems of humans and machines alike are both separate in inextricable from one another in this picture.